Using colloquialisms the reader may not be familiar with
I'm from Ireland, most of my stories take place in Ireland, and many of my characters will speak with Irish accents and/or dialects to varying degrees. For the most part I think this is OK, and can often be endearing to non-Irish readers. However I know from experience that certain phrases and colloquialisms can be quite jarring for someone who is not familiar with them. Usually this occurs when messing with grammar, for example:
amn’t (am not)
yous (you plural)
usen’t to (used to not, i.e. didn’t used to)
These are just some examples from my own life where a non-Irish person was downright offended when I’ve said one of the above. In my writing, I had one reviewer comment “yous is not a word you absolute nutcase”!
In some cases I think the Irishness of the story or character allows for this sort of thing, and it’s stylistically important. Other times it’s completely irrelevant but it’s just what comes naturally to me as I’m writing. In the latter cases, is there a benefit to leaving these sorts of things out and trying to neutralise the language (mostly for dialogue and first person narration)? Or is there any reason I should leave them in?
In dialogue and first person narration, I think this sort of thing would be a nice addition (then again, I always hear t …
6y ago
Dialect used in dialogue can work well, especially when the writer is fluent. (Writers who aren't fluent in the dialect …
6y ago
I think this depends on your intended audience; if it is almost entirely Irish familiar with the dialect, leave it. It s …
6y ago
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/33837. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
3 answers
In dialogue and first person narration, I think this sort of thing would be a nice addition (then again, I always hear the phrase "this sort of thing" in Dermot Morgan's voice, so I'm probably not one of the readers that are concerning you). You will gain the affection of some readers, while others might find the going a bit more difficult - how you choose to resolve that balancing act will be up to you.
Unless it's first person narration or a firmly developed character as the narrator, it would probably be safest to stick to more standard expressions outside dialogue.
I just answered a different question about POV narration with a reference to Trainspotting, which wasn't shy about using Edinburgh dialects, so it can be done well and successfully (which are not necessarily the same thing).
I was going to close this answer by suggesting it was all about the intended audience, but made the mistake of refreshing the page and seeing that Amadeus had beaten me to it.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33840. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Dialect used in dialogue can work well, especially when the writer is fluent. (Writers who aren't fluent in the dialect they're trying to use can make a mess of it.) Dialect is another aspect of how your characters speak. If you do it in a way that the meaning is either clear or supplied by context, your readers will be able to follow. Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon did this well; some of her Nigerian characters heavily used a pidgin English, and while I had the occasional "huh?" while reading, I was never lost. (She also included a glossary, which I didn't notice until I got to the end.)
Writing in first person from the POV of dialect-using character could be more of a strain for your readers. Readers want to be able to immerse themselves in a story, and have different levels of tolerance for things that throw them out of it. I suspect you'll find it easier to use dialect, without using a cabbagehead (or Watson) character, if you use third person instead of first person.
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I think this depends on your intended audience; if it is almost entirely Irish familiar with the dialect, leave it. It sounds authentic to them, and is not jarring. Even if it is just that story; which it may be if you are trying to get started by publishing locally, a short story in a magazine or something.
If you hope that your story is going to be published more widely, so the majority of readers are NOT familiar with the colloquialisms, then I would adopt an attitude of "spicing" your language with colloquialisms that aren't going to drive editors and grammarians to put the book down, because it is just too difficult to read.
Give readers a taste of the Irish flavor, something you do once per page or so, don't douse them with it on every third line of dialogue.
You will likely not lose any Irish readers by doing that, or at least you will lose fewer of them than you would lose non-Irish English speakers. And you won't lose any of the critics and opinion-setters in other countries that might consider your authenticity overdone to the point of cliché (even if that is the real world in Ireland).
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